Heterogeneous catalysis is concerned with the design, fabrication and characterization of catalysts that are in a different phase than the reactants and products. The use of heterogeneous catalysts in many industrially relevant reactions is by now commonplace. Due to the tremendously large number of parameters going into the design of efficient catalysts including composition, operating temperature and promoters, building recipes that work is a challenging task. With the advent of computational materials science, some of the effort has now been outsourced to the ab initio community.

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Our group works on a number of catalysis projects.

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1. Selective oxidation of alcohols on Au surfaces

2. The water-gas shift reaction

3. NOx storage/reduction